Abstract

There are a lot of applications that run on
modern mobile operating systems. Inevitably, some of these
applications fail in the hands of users. Diagnosing a failure
to identify the culprit, or merely reproducing that failure in
the lab is difficult. To get insight into this problem, we interviewed
developers of five mobile applications and analyzed
hundreds of trouble tickets. We find that support for diagnosing
unexpected application behavior is lacking across major
mobile platforms. Even when developers implement heavyweight
logging during controlled trials, they do not discover
many dependencies that are then stressed in the wild. They
are also not well-equipped to understand how to monitor the
large number of dependencies without impacting the phone’s
limited resources such as CPU and battery. Based on these
findings, we argue for three fundamental changes to failure
reporting on mobile phones. The first is spatial spreading,
which exploits the large number of phones in the field by
spreading the monitoring work across them. The second is
statistical inference, which builds a conditional distribution
model between application behavior and its dependencies in
the presence of partial information. The third is adaptive sampling,
which dynamically varies what each phone monitors,
to adapt to both the varying population of phones and what is
being learned about each failure. We propose a system called
MobiBug that combines these three techniques to simplify the
task of diagnosing mobile applications.